Social and economic development of underdeveloped & developing countries bringing about an equitable growth eradicating the poverty, hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy and providing the poor better livelihood options...

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Social media
permits multiple identities - tribal, feudal, regional, linguistic, national,
religious, ... It allows the material impulses/instincts to be satisfied by proxy,
in the virtual world. The very nature of the network allows hierarchical and horizontal
connections with others

Recent technological innovations
put the tools of production of media content in the hands of common man. It allows
anybody with access to the Net to reach across to millions. It gives voice to
erstwhile voiceless. Access to these tools empowers the powerless.

For the traditional large
corporate media houses, however, it has been very disempowering. Grandmothers start
chitchatting with their grandchildren on the other part of the world,
disregarding their favourite serial - because that is the best time to interact
with people on the other part of the world. Young householders living in rented
flats are attending to their virtual farms and decorating their virtual houses,
fulfilling their instincts and dreams. Young children making up animation
stories using applications in iPad... Attracting eyeballs to any mass
entertainment has never been more difficult.

From the traditional mass
media point of view, the new media is seen as merely another platform for
delivery. But the new media is much more than that. It is a platform for
interactions, conversations, searching, creating and sharing. Sharing is a two
way process but media delivery is a one way street. The traditional business
models for media are not yet really ready for this transformation.

We need to
guard against the negative impact of the social media, which ought to be used
in the correct manner for creative or productive purposes so that it is
progressive to mankind and society at large, rather than regressive

The term social mediais being used quite often by everyone and has become a popular topic
of conversation, debates and controversies. Contrary to popular belief and
perceptions of the general public, social media is not just restricted to sites
like Facebook and Twitter. Social media, in fact, encompasses all the web services
that facilitate creation, sharing and exchange of user-generated content. These
include but are not restricted to Internet forums, groups, blogs, microblogs,
networking sites, social bookmarking sites, wikis, podcasts, content communities
for articles, video/photo sharing sites, Q & A sites, review sites and so
on and so forth, the list is endless. The number of people accessing and using
the social media is increasing exponentially day by day. But how many of us truly
understand what social media is and the effect it has on people as individuals
and the society at large.

People’s movements, civil society organizations,
academic thinktanks, and progressive political leaders will have to lead the way,
both by resisting today’s destructive processes and by building on existing alternatives

India’s
attempts at integrating environmental sustainability into economic planning have so far been piecemeal and
hesitant. They have done little to stem the rapid slide into ecological
devastation and consequent livelihood, cultural, and economic disruption. At
the root of this lies the stubborn adherence to a model of economic growth that
is fundamentally unsustainable and inequitable, even more so in its
‘globalised’ form in the last two decades.

The
12th Plan process could have been an opportunity to change course, specially
given its explicit commitment to sustainability, inclusiveness and equity.
Indeed there are some glimpses of a different approach, e.g. making economic activities
more responsible in their use of resources and in the wastes they produce,
promoting urban water harvesting and public transport, providing organic inputs
to agriculture use, encouraging recycling, making tourism more environmentally
responsible and community-based, moving towards low-carbon strategies, and protecting
the ‘commons’ (lands and waters that are used by the public), giving
communities more secure rights to use and manage these. Yet the Plan falls far short of significant reorientation, mostly staying within the
confines of assuming that more growth will help achieve these goals. It does
not use any available framework of ‘sustainable development’, including
the targets that India agreed to at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development
(Johannesberg). It does not contain indicators to gauge whether India is
moving towards sustainability, e.g. improvement in per capita availability of
natural forests, reduction in the levels of various kinds of pollution,
improved access to nutritious food and clean water, or enhanced availability of
public transport. Environmental considerations do not yet permeate each
economic sector.

Providing an Improved Environment for
Human Rights in The Country(India)

While human like rights institutions the NHRC have a significant
role in the promotion and protection of human rights, the contributions of
civil society actors and the state are just as crucial

An informed discussion on how to provide
an improved environment for human rights in the country, and how to achieve
social justice through human rights is very necessary. Social justice, as the
American philosopher John Rawls
pointed out, ‘is predicated on the idea
that a society can be regarded as egalitarian only when it is based on
principles of equality and solidarity, where human rights are valued and the
dignity of every individual upheld.’ A just society is one which provides a
degree of protection to its weaker, differently-abled and less gifted members.
It is not one where the law of the jungle prevails, where might is right. In a
civilized society, reasonable constraints are placed on the ambitions and
acquisitiveness of its more aggressive members and special safeguards provided
to its weaker and more vulnerable sections. These considerations are basic to
any scheme of social justice and their neglect will brutalize society. In a
limited sense, the right to social justice may be said to be the right of
the weak, aged, destitute, poor, women, children and other underprivileged
persons, to the protection of the State against the ruthless competition of
life. It is a bundle of rights, in another sense it is a preserver of other
rights. It is the balancing wheel between haves and have-nots.

Public Private Partnerships (PPPs): Analysing
the factors behind their growth

The economic perspective in favour of PPP
is that they present an attractive alternative to the market and contractualised
relationships and are viewed to be broader in scope than privatisation and a
qualitative leap from traditional contracting

The term ‘Public Private Partnership’
or ‘PPP’ has become a buzzword of late in the policy circles, and is being
increasingly resorted to as a preferred medium for provisioning of public
services both within the industrialised and low-income countries. While the PPPs
are more commonly found in the transport infrastructure sector, such as roads,
airports, and ports (primarily due to the commercial pricing models), they are
also invoked in water supply and sanitation, tourism, education, health, and
other social sector programmes, albeit to a lesser degree. A significant difference is however observed in the nature of PPPs
across these sectors. In many cases
they appear to be glorified forms
of service level agreements rather than ‘partnerships’ as are defined in the normative literature on PPPs.

In a country
as diverse and complex as India is, a properly restructured and prioritized
social media can act as a catalyst for the creation of the social capital in
step with the creation of the economic capital, synergetically reinforcing each
other

Social media means different
things to different people. It can be used for hobby or as a serious and effective
business tool. Behind every organizational success story in this media is a lot
of patient planning and a sharp focus on getting things right – putting all the
right elements in the right way in the right place at the right time. Like any
other technology or facility, social media technology or facility too becomes
good or bad depending on how it is used. In this article we forecast the
evolutionary path likely up to the year 2020 for the ICT -ambience as well as
the social media shaped by it and show how the enhanced or new features of this
media can be well utilized to create social capital in the process of
socio-economic development of the country.

Evolution of ICT-Ambience For Social Media

Formal technology
forecast exercises carried out by the author in the past four years had
predicted the IT-ambience supporting the social media, among others, up to 2020
in terms of Converged Mobile Handset (CMH), Bandwidth Enablers, Fourth Generation
Long term Evolution (4G-LTE), Nanotechnology, web 3.0, Mobile Intelligent
Agents (MIA), Cloud Computing and Reusable Component Software. These are
briefly outlined below :

The Report identifies four areas for particular
attention: “enhancing equity, including on gender dimension; enabling greater
voice and participation of citizens, including youth; confronting environmental
pressures; and managing demographic change”

The elevation of a Jesuit from Argentina to
the highest rank of the tradition-bound Roman Catholic church – arguably one of
the most conservative and orthodox institutions of the established world order
– is the clearest sign for believers of that faith of the ascendency of the global
South. For followers of other faiths and non-believers, however, this dramatic
shift was highlighted yet again by another more secular ritual: the release of
the 2013 Human Development Report (HDR) by the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP).

Aptly titled The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse
Worldthe Report notes: “For
the first time in 150 years, the combined output of the developing world’s three
leading economies – Brazil, China and India [BIC] – is about equal to the
combined GDP of the longstanding industrial powers of the North – Canada, France,
Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States [six of the original
G-7].” The global South is generally understood to be countries that do
not belong to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),
with one or two notable exceptions, such as Chile.

TO Demonstrate why government
bodies in India need to be on social media, we would like to draw your
attention to one fact – by June 2013, 66 million Indians will be on social
media*. This number is fast growing, with over 150,000 new users joining social
media platforms every month. While these statistics appear relatively minor in
comparison to the total population, it is important to note heir influence. For
instance, a new study asserts, “at a very conservative estimate, the
fortunes of contestants seeking election to the next Lok Sabha from not less than
150 constituencies will be determined by Facebook users”. The point here is
that government institutions can no longer ignore engagement on social media platforms.
These platforms provide voice to people, and it is essential to not only listen
to them for feedback but also engage in dialogue through them. This engagement
is not just a marketing tool prior to elections. Rather, it allows for a constant
engagement between Ministries and the public, and is now an important component
of the government’s service delivery to citizens.

Governments around the
world have recognized the power of social media. President Barack Obama uses
Twitter town halls to take questions from the people, the Russian law
department periodically seeks feedback on new policies through their Twitter
handle, and in Ontario the province crowd-sourced ideas on how to better
integrate social innovation in the government. Even in India, our Prime
Minister’s Office uses Twitter to inform its 5 lakh plus followers on the
activities of the PM. These are just a few examples to show that there is a
growing acknowledgement that greater transparency can be achieved through proactive
dissemination of information from the government.

Almost half a century ago, the philosopher Thomas
Nagel published a famous paper called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The
question I want to ask is: what is it like to be a human being? As it
happens, Tom Nagel’s insightful paper in The Philosophical Review was also
really about human beings, and only marginally about bats. Among other points,
Nagel expressed deep scepticism about the temptation of observational
scientists to identify the experience of being a bat—or similarly, a human
being—with the associated physical phenomena in the brain and elsewhere in the
body that are within easy reach of outside inspection. The sense of being a bat
or a human can hardly be seen as just having certain twitches in the brain and
of the body. The complexity of the former cannot be resolved by the easier
tractability of the latter (tempting though it may be to do just that).

The cutting edge of the human development
approach is also based on a distinction— but of a rather different kind from Nagel’s
basic epistemological contrast. The approach that Mahbub ul Haq
pioneered through the series of Human Development Reports which began in 1990 is that
between, on the one hand, the difficult problem of assessing the richness of
human lives, including the
freedoms that human beings have reason to value, and on the other, the much
easier exercise of keeping track of incomes and other external resources that
persons—or nations—happen to have. Gross domestic product (GDP) is much
easier to see and measure than the quality of human life that people have. But
human well-being and freedom, and their connection with fairness and justice in
the world, cannot be reduced simply to the measurement of GDP and its growth rate,
as many people are tempted to do.

Individuals cannot flourish alone; indeed,
they cannot function alone. The human development approach, however, has been essentially individualistic, assuming that
development is the expansion of individuals’ capabilities or freedoms. Yet there
are aspects of societies that affect individuals but cannot be assessed at the
individual level because they are based on relationships, such as how well
families or communities function, summarized for society as a whole in the
ideas of social cohesion and social inclusion.

Individuals are bound up with others.
Social institutions affect individuals’ identities and choices. Being a member
of a healthy society is an essential part of a thriving existence. So one task
of the human development approach is to explore the nature of social institutions that are favourable for
human flourishing.
Development then has to be assessed not only for the short-run impact on
individual capabilities, but also for whether society evolves in a way that
supports human flourishing. Social conditions affect not only the outcomes of individuals in a
particular society today, but also those of future generations.

Everyone has a right to dream, whether abled
or differently abled. Iqbal (2005) of Nagesh Kukunoor asserts the victory of such
undying spirit. The dumb boy, Iqbal aspires to be a bowler in the Indian
Cricket Team. He suffers discrimination but triumphs over all odds

Disability
is a major concern of our society. The Governmental and Non-Governmental sectors
have been making efforts to
fight it but it still remains a big challenge.
We often hear about the pervasive presence of disability among people through
the media which is an important source to cultivate right attitude
towards disability and create awareness about it among people. Film is surely a
very important medium towards this end. It would be interesting and pertinent
to know as to how disability gets portrayed in cinema. This becomes all the more
important because of the at large wide ranging impact of cinema on the society
and public.

Our
mythology and puranas also do contain examples of differently-abled individuals
like Dhritrashtra, Manthara, Ashtaavakra etc. Disability
can be either inborn or a consequence of some unfortunate incident in life such
as disease or accident. Films too have given space to representation of disability
in various artistic forms.

Only
recently a film by Anurag Basu
Barfiwas
released. It also became
the official entry of India for
Oscars. The protagonist Ranbeer Kapur playing a deaf and dumb man is
simultaneously attracted to two girls, one of them being a physically
challenged girl. The boy,
Barfi, prefers the physically challenged
girl over the other one. But, why ? It’s indeed a thought provoking question.
Priyanka Chopra was much admired for her role as a mentally challenged girl,
world apart from the glitter and
glamour. It is significant that when
a star of Bollywood plays such a character he is thought of displaying an
exemplary courage for an artist. For instance, Sanjeev Kumar was much
appreciated for playing the disabled in the legendary film Sholayalthough as we do know that his disability
was incidental rather than being from birth. Likewise in the film Koi Mil
Gaya (2003) Hrithik Roshan played
a mentally challenged whose mental age was that of a eight year child although
his biological age was twenty years. This movie was meant for the children and
carried little social message yet, it proved that skilful use of creativity can
make for a commercial hit as well.

Inclusive education is primarily about restructuring
school culture, policy and practice so that it responds to the diversity of
students in the locality. It sees individual differences not as problems to be fixed, but as opportunities
to enrich learning and embrace change

“A society that has no
vision for the education of children and youth

and is not prepared for
the same, is doomed to die.”

....Mahatma Gandhi

Education
is the right of every child for that is what equips him to meet the challenges
of life. Children with disabilities need this all the more, to supplement their
different talents so that they can prepare themselves for a happy, productive
and useful life. Apart from formal education, per se, children with
disabilities have also to contend with several issues connected with their
disability, such as attitude of the society, lack of employment opportunities and
health concerns. These issues have been topics of deliberation at various fora
within the country and across the world including the United Nations. It is
widely recognized that much more needs to be done to integrate children and
adults with disabilities in the mainstream.

The Reality

India
has the second largest education system in the world, with more than 200
million school aged children. 6 to 14 years of these approximately 20 million (10
per cent) do not have access to regular education (as per NSSO 2002 &
Census 2001). While the national average of enrolment in schools is over 90 per
cent, less than five per cent of children with disabilities are enrolled in schools.
Moreover, about 40 per cent of these children are not able to complete the first five years of basic education, while another 20 percent
leave school prior to the completion of three years of free and compulsory
schooling as mandated by our Constitution.

The
Constitution of India enshrined that elementary education is a fundamental right
of every child. The
same has been reiterated in several international instruments like the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 and the Biwako Millennium Framework
for action towards an inclusive, barrier-free and right-based society. The
National Policy on education states - “In our national perception, education is
essentially for all… Education has an
acculturating role. It refines sensitivities
and perceptions that contribute to national cohesion, a scientific temper and independence of mind and spirit”. The country also has a national policy for
persons with disabilities framed by the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment. The policy reflects their concern and recognizes that persons
with disabilities are a valuable human resource and seeks to create an
environment which provides them equal opportunities, protects their rights and
ensures full participation in social and community activities. This in itself includes
children with disabilities.

Vocational
Education & Skill Development in Secondary Education in the XII Plan

The aim is to increase the percentage of
the workforce which has received formal skills through vocational education and
training from 12.0 percent at present to 25.0 percent by the end of the Twelfth
Plan. This would mean that about 70 million more people have to be imparted formal
skills in the next five years.

With
a dramatic growth in elementary education enrolments and improvements in retention
and transition rates in recent years, particularly after the enforcement of RTE
Act, the demand for secondary schooling is growing rapidly. Meeting this demand
is critical for three reasons. First, secondary education fulfils large
manpower needs of the semi-organized and the organized sectors of the economy. Second,
it is the supply chain for higher education. Finally, it caters to the needs of
teachers for primary schooling.

Public
expenditure on secondary education has increased from Rs.35,806 crore in
2007–08 to Rs.94,183 crore in 2011–12, leading to an increase in its shareas a percentage of GDP from 0.78 percent to
1.05 per cent. Per capita expenditure on secondary education has gone up from
Rs.315 to Rs.784 during this period. The Central Government’s expenditure has
gone up from Rs.2,578 crore in 2007–08 to Rs.13,278 crore in 2011–12, a five-fold increase. There is significant private expenditure as
well. The average private expenditure on secondary education in private schools
is as high as Rs.893 per month as compared to only Rs.275 per month in
government schools. This difference is primarily due to high tuition fees in
private schools.

In its journey to improve services for citizens, the government
has undertaken several successful e-governance initiatives such as MCA21
(to improve the speed and certainty in the delivery of the services of Ministry
of Company Affairs), online submission of income tax returns, Passport Seva Kendra
(PSK), etc. Also, to roll out all the planned 1,100 e-governance services by
2014, the government is making huge investment -up to Rs 40,000 crore. This
investment will cover the cost of all kinds of hardware and software that will
be required for capacity building.

‘At your service’ or Mee Seva is Government
of Andhra Pradesh’s window to its citizens. Nearly 6,000 Mee Seva Counters are servicing over 50,000 requests per
day, which are geared to handle 100,000 transactions a day. It has converged
all National e-Governance Programme (NeGP) initiatives in rendering G2C services
in a fast and secure way – thus ended the “tyranny of ink signatures”.
Back-end applications interact with database and pull out information and
front-end application receives the citizen’s request
and communicates with departmental application
– therefore gives a single view of the citizen. It involves departments like revenue,
registration, municipal administration, education and other service delivery
channels.

The State government has also initiated the ‘Information Kerala
Mission’ project for the deployment of technology at the grassroots level as a
model for participatory governance through effective use of IT

With the advent of Information Communication Technology(ICT),
Indian governance has entered into a new sphere of globalization. Previously
online and offline governance were treated as two different spheres but with
the emergence of ICT, this distinction has been blurred. There is a common assumption
of e-government as the automation of government services, yet, there is much
more to e-government. A working definition of e-governmentis that it is: “the use of information technology to support government operations,
engage citizens, and provide government services” (D. Sharon, 2003). The creation of this new
cyber regime must incorporate good e-governance to deliver effectively and efficiently to citizens. The Government of India has formulated the National
e- governance Plan (NeGP) to expedite deployment of Information Technology
in governance with a vision to improve delivery of government services to
citizens, business and other stakeholders. It has
been recognized that a quantum jump in the quality of services is possible only by adoption and implementation of the
principles of e-Governance. While initially the political and managerial focus was
on developing e-services within each public institution, with limited
consideration being given to cross-organizational coherence, the focus today
has clearly shifted towards coordinated services offering one-stop shops
to citizens and businesses (OECD 2007). In this context, this study has been carried
out to examine the impact of an urban e-governance project of a South Indian
State on good governance.

Attempts on e-Governance
in India

India was one of the earliest to respond to the possibilities of
using ICTs in development administration in the developing world. It may be
noted that the Indian State began to design and execute rural development programmes
with a relatively visible ICT content in the 1970s, while international
attention on the potential of harnessing ICTs for developmental activities is a
much new phenomenon. Several attempts have been made to use ICTs for
improvising development planning, a key area of State action in the
pre-liberalisation era. The Dharampur Sub-District Infrastructure Planning for Development
(1977) is one such early example of an attempt to use computer applications for
cost optimization and decision-making. The Karwar Rural Development Information
System (1984) was yet another initiative formulated with a focus on reducing
delay and curbing corruption through a monitoring programme based on computer
applications (Kaul. et. al, quoted in Bhatnagar,
1990).

The larger share of public investments into R&D could also
be leveraged by focusing of R&D for public and social good priorities of India

The ability to innovate and deploy globally competitive technologies
has been recognized as the next key driver of global economic change in the
emerging knowledge economy. While science is scholarship driven,
technology and innovations are market and competition driven, respectively. Currently,
Indian Research and Development landscape is largely influenced by the
character of public funded research and selection of R&D priorities is mostly
supply driven. The private sector investments into R&D have been marginal.
Therefore, demand driven component of R&D goals has been limited. Policy,
strategy and tools are required to stimulate larger investments into demand
driven R&D goals. Energy sector invests far too low into R&D,
although industrial turn over in the sector is extremely high. Promotion of
Public-Private Partnerships into R&D and clean energy is a critical
component of India’s competitiveness in global trade and industrial growth. New
strategies and tools are required to stimulate engagement of private sector
into R&D and enhance the share of private sector investment from the current
26% of India’s R&D spend to at least 50% during the 12th plan period.

The larger share of
public investments into R&D could also be leveraged by focusing of R&D
for public and social good priorities of the country. There is an un-tapped
opportunity for India to emerge as a global leader in affordable innovations
under PPP by focusing on R&D for public and social goods in the areas of agriculture
and food security, water, energy, affordable health care, education,
environment, renovation of urban infrastructure, S&T inputs to rural
development etc. Residual idealism among the youth and vast talent base
offer an opportunity for the R&D sector in the country to gain leadership
in affordable and social innovations.

Budget of a government is
a comprehensive statement of government finances relating to a particular year.
Every Budget broadly consists of two parts- (i) Expenditure Budget and (ii) Receipts
Budget.

The amounts of intended expenditure
by the Government in the next financial year are expressed in the Expenditure Budget.

The entire Expenditure
Budget can be divided into two distinct categories, viz.

i) Capital Expenditure : those expenditures by the government that lead to an increase
in the assets or a reduction in the liabilities of the government. It is
however not necessary that the assets created should be productive or they
should even be revenue generating. Only the charges towards the construction of
the asset are counted as Capital expenditure, while the subsequent charges for
its maintenance are considered as Revenue expenditure. Most capital expenditure
is nonrecurring.

- Examples of Capital Expenditure
causing ‘increase in assets’: construction of a new Flyover, Union Govt. giving
a Loan to a State Govt.

- Examples of Capital Expenditure
causing ‘reduction of a liability’: Union Govt. repays the principal amount of
a loan it had taken in the past.

The budget process in
India, like in most other countries, comprises four distinct phases:

i) Budget formulation- preparation of estimates of expenditure and receipts for
the ensuing financial year;

ii) Budget enactment-
approval of the proposed Budget by the Legislature through the enactment of
Finance Bill and Appropriation Bill;

iii) Budget execution-
enforcement of the provisions in the Finance Act and Appropriation Act by the government—collection of receipts and making disbursements for
various services as approved by the Legislature;

iv) Legislative review of
budget implementation- audits of government’s financial operations on behalf of
the Legislature.

Process commences in August- September

By convention, the Union
Budget for next financial year is presented in Lok Sabha by the finance
minister on the last working day of February. However,
the process of budget formulation starts in the last week of August or the first fortnight of September. To get the process started,
the Budget Division in the Department of Economic Affairs under
the Ministry of Finance issues the annual budget circular to all the Union government
ministries/departments around August- September. The Circular contains detailed
instructions for these ministries/ departments on the form and content of the
statement of budget estimates to be prepared by them.

The Challenge of Good Governance in India:
Need for Innovative Approaches

The need is to go for ‘million negotiations’
that would ensure that government, market and civil society work together for the
poor

Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru,
the first Prime Minister
of India, in his famous Tryst with Destiny speech of 15th August 1947
succinctly put the task before people’s representatives and the services in the
following words; “….. to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous,
democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political
institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and
woman.” These works are still in progress. A
deeper look at these tasks would clearly establish that these goals are
entirely within the realm of governance.

Meaning

There
is no accepted definition of
governance. There is divergence of opinion about the meaning of governance
between the conservatives and the liberals, between socialists and the communists.

In
recent years the word governance has become a very fashionable term and is
being used in a variety of ways and that covers a large number of organizations
both in public and private domains.

For
our purposes, however, we are confining governance only to public domain. We
are concerned here with that form of governance which serves the citizens by safeguarding
territorial integrity of the State and securing individual security, rule of
law and the delivery of services ranging from education, health to livelihood and
food security.

The DBT programme, if it manages to overcome
the challenges, might well confound its critics and create a whole new paradigm
for delivering of entitlements in India

The Direct
Benefits Transfers (DBT) programme was announced with much fanfare
as a “game changer”. Even before it could be rolled out in 43 districts, the FM
rolled back the programme to 23 districts for the pilots, within a fortnight of
the announcement of the programme. Since then much air-time has been devoted to
the merits and demerits of this programme with the debate largely along ideological
lines.

What
needs to be clearly acknowledged that despite these initial setbacks, the idea of
the DBT programme that has been announced is not just unexceptionable, it is a
move in the right direction that was long overdue. Cash transfers are not a new
idea, not even in India, and most of the programmes that have been brought
within the ambit of this programme are existing cash transfers. The programme
that has been announced is not creating any new cash transfers but is instead consolidating
the delivery of the existing schemes.

The
real “game changer” in this is two-fold: the idea of universal financial inclusion and, the timely transfer of benefits to entitlement holders without intermediaries and unnecessary
paperwork. The use of Aadhar
enabled authentication as the backbone of this system is likely to plug
leakages that are built into these programmes. The technological/ IT
architecture as well as the proposed financial architecture, have the potential
of transformational change in rural areas, not very dissimilar to the revolution
that rural telephony and mobile telephony have unleashed over the past two
decades. Critics of the DBT, in failing to recognize this transformational
potential, are doing themselves a disservice.